The D&D Experience pt. 1

This is something that has been kicking around in the back of my mind for a little while. So, if you will indulge me, I would like to tell a short story.

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I couldn't give an exact date, but it was during my middle school years when I first discovered exactly what Dungeons and Dragons is. Until then, I had only a vague idea of a game played mostly by nerds in years past. So, one weekend I was sent to stay at my grandparent's house because my parents were celebrating an anniversary, or some such holiday. Their house is very easy to picture because it is the quintessential grandparent house. Really old. Really comfortable. Really good food. I usually slept in a room upstairs that formerly belonged to my youngest uncle and still had a lot of his stuff packed away in the closet. During the afternoon I was bored, so while my grandparents were downstairs doing boring old-person stuff I decided to go digging through the closet. Invasion of privacy be damned, I was a restless little kid!

I should note that by this time I had read Tolkien, (some) Dragonlance, and Harry Potter, so, for a kid, I was well-versed in fantasy.

Although, looking back, simply reading fantasy didn't really prepare me for what I found. Several open boxes were buried under a pile of clothes, so I decided to pull those out and sort through them. What I found in them immediately seemed to me a gold mine. For effect, I'll just list everything contained therein.

Books:

• 1st Edition AD&D Player's Handbook
• 1st Edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide
• 1st Edition AD&D Monster Manual
• 1st Edition AD&D Monster Manual 2
• 2 copies of (one is pretty ratty) 1st Edition AD&D Deities & Demigods
• 1st Edition AD&D Fiend Folio
• 1st Edition AD&D Unearthed Arcana

Modules:

• The Keep on the Borderlands
• The Isle of Dread
• Against the Giants
• Queen of the Demonweb Pits
• Vault of the Drow
• Tomb of the Lizard King
• Lost Tomb of Martek
• The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror
  
• Master of the Desert Nomads
• Sabre River

Other stuff:

• World of Greyhawk Folio Gazetteer
• an old folder full of graph paper, character sheets, and item/loot information

It took me most of the afternoon to just wrap my head around everything I had found. The complexity and detail that each adventure and book contained completely blew my mind. I thought the old, hand drawn illustrations that accompanied many of the descriptions were particularly cool. Because I have always been a sucker for maps, though, the Gazetteer was my favorite. The gigantic fold out map and the accompanying booklet described in minute detail an entire world that seemed to be begging to be explored.

In spite of the internet and its endless information, I am glad that this is how I found D&D. It would have been too easy and boring to just do a Google search for Dungeons and Dragons and read up on it. This sort of hands-on discovery fits perfectly with the spirit of tabletop gaming. It's just you, your friends, a few materials, and your collective imagination that brings the stories to life. So far I had three out of those four things, my brain was excited and my imagination was really starting to cook with the possibilities offered in these books.

My grandmother eventually came upstairs to find out why I had been so quiet all afternoon. She found me sitting on the floor next to the bed reading the Monster Manual. She smiled and said something like, "Oh, you've found all of Paul's (my uncle) old Dungeons and Dragons books, have you?" Apparently, when my uncle was in high school he was also in a local boy scout troop in which he made friends with some guys who got him into playing D&D.

Needless to say, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening combing through many different books and modules; all the while my imagination expanding. When my parents came back and it was time to go home, my grandmother said I could take all the D&D stuff with me (as parents are sometimes apt to do without asking their children first)! This made me quite the excited little boy. On the way home I told my mom all about the cool stuff I had found. By the end of that day I had learned that Wizards of the Coast was currently producing the D&D materials and that it was in it's 3.5 edition. You can guess what my Christmas list that year consisted of. Eventually, we talked to my uncle, told him what I had found, and he was only too happy to pass his stuff on to a younger generation.

Thus began my problem and overarching idea for this post.

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I originally intended this to be one post, but I don't want it to run too long and bore everyone to death. So, in the next couple of days I will write part two. I hope this has given at least some insight into a much younger generation coming upon tabletop fantasy games. In the second part I'm going to discuss my current generation's lack of imagination and how games like D&D just don't seem to cut it for most kids any more.


What I'm listening to:
"Young Adult Friction" by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
It can be found under this review.

-Max